“Oh, but we’re coming back—­after we’ve
been taught all manner of necessary things.”

“Edna’ll be the only one of you girls left behind; it’s rough on her.”

“It certainly is; we’ll all have to write her heaps of letters.”

“Much time there’ll be for letter-writing, outside of the home ones,” Tom said.

“Speaking of time,” Josie turned towards them, “we’re going to be busier than any bee ever dreamed of being, before or since Dr. Watts.”

They certainly were busy days that followed.  So many of the young folks were going off that fall that a good many of the meetings of “The S. W. F. Club” resolved themselves into sewing-bees, for the girl members only.

“If we’d known how jolly they were, we’d have tried them before,” Bell declared one morning, dropping down on the rug Pauline had spread under the trees at one end of the parsonage lawn.

Patience, pulling bastings with a business-like air, nodded her curly head wisely.  “Miranda says, folks mostly get ’round to enjoying their blessings ’bout the time they come to lose them.”

“Has the all-important question been settled yet, Paul?” Edna asked, looking up from her work.  She might not be going away to school, but even so, that did not debar one from new fall clothes at home.

“They’re coming to Vergennes with me,”
Bell said.  “Then we can all come home
together Friday nights.”

“They’re coming to Boston with me,” Josie corrected, “then we’ll be back together for Thanksgiving.”

Shirley, meekly taking her first sewing lessons under Pauline’s instructions, and frankly declaring that she didn’t at all like them, dropped the hem she was turning.  “They’re coming to New York with me; and in the between-times we’ll have such fun that they’ll never want to come home.”

Pauline laughed.  “It looks as though
Hilary and I would have a busy winter
between you all.  It is a comfort to know where
we are going.”

“Remember!” she warned, when later the
party broke up.  “Four o’clock Friday afternoon!  Sharp!”

“Are we going out in a blaze of glory?”
Bell questioned.

“You might tell us where we are going,
now, Paul,” Josie urged.

Pauline shook her head.  “You wait until
Friday, like good little girls.  Mind, you all
bring wraps; it’ll be chilly coming home.”

Pauline’s turn was to be the final wind-up of the club’s regular outings.  No one outside the home folks, excepting Tom, had been taken into her confidence—­it had been necessary to press him into service.  And when, on Friday afternoon, the young people gathered at the parsonage, all but those named were still in the dark.

Besides the regular members, Mrs. Shaw,
Mr. Dayre, Mr. Allen, Harry Oram and Patience
were there; the minister and Dr. Brice
had promised to join the party later if possible.